EvilEmuOfDoom
New Challenger
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2012
- Posts
- 63
I was really bummed to find out that a certain "other" LED backlighting project came soooooo close to completion before stopping. However, there was a lot of good information in that thread and along with a few others and the information on http://wiki.neogeodev.org I thought to myself "I might just be able to do that". So, I set out to give it a try...
Having delt with LED marquees recently for my MK2 and TMNT cabs, I really wanted the option to adjust the brightness so right off the bat, that was a desire for me. Having played around with Arduino projects last year, I immediately though of PWM as a means of dimming and started working on an Arduino based MVS lighting controller. At the same time, I wanted to use the logic portion of the MV-ELA board to drive LEDs in case the MCU controller didn't pan out.
So, I've been working on both and have made some really good progress so far. I have the arduino-based controller partially working already with it fully recognizing game changes and being able to swicth lights successfully. My progress can be seen in the following two videos:
As for the non-MCU design, I found a nice simple non-MCU PWM circuit on the web that I was able to build a working dimmable LED setup using potentiometers. The only limitation being that each individual mini-marquee backlight would have it's own dimmer pot although that could be a feature if you consider the face that some MMs are darker/lighter than others. I have parts coming from Mouser on Tuesday and hope to have a prototype of this later in the week.
I plan on making this an Open Source Hardware project for the following reasons:
1) I love tinkering and this project is a perfect example of something I wished someone else had done and said "ok, so here's how you build it". I've found the arcade collecting community to be very supportive and I would love to give something back to it.
2) If for some reason I fail, get bored, get interrupted by real life, etc., I want to make all of my information public so that if someone else wanted to pick up where I left off and complete the project they could easily do so.
3) Realistically, there is a limited market for this so even IF I were to make a polished final product and sell any, it would be for those that can't or don't want to spend the time building there own. This is not my job, it's a hobby, so any proceeds will go to funding further arcade projects and cabinets and the cost would really only cover parts and assembly time in order to keep it as low as possible .
4) By sharing my work, a real engineer might see it and say "dude, it would work a lot better if you did THIS..." and the end result would be a better product for everyone .
Once I have it working a little better I'll post my schematics and code in this thread.
Having delt with LED marquees recently for my MK2 and TMNT cabs, I really wanted the option to adjust the brightness so right off the bat, that was a desire for me. Having played around with Arduino projects last year, I immediately though of PWM as a means of dimming and started working on an Arduino based MVS lighting controller. At the same time, I wanted to use the logic portion of the MV-ELA board to drive LEDs in case the MCU controller didn't pan out.
So, I've been working on both and have made some really good progress so far. I have the arduino-based controller partially working already with it fully recognizing game changes and being able to swicth lights successfully. My progress can be seen in the following two videos:
As for the non-MCU design, I found a nice simple non-MCU PWM circuit on the web that I was able to build a working dimmable LED setup using potentiometers. The only limitation being that each individual mini-marquee backlight would have it's own dimmer pot although that could be a feature if you consider the face that some MMs are darker/lighter than others. I have parts coming from Mouser on Tuesday and hope to have a prototype of this later in the week.
I plan on making this an Open Source Hardware project for the following reasons:
1) I love tinkering and this project is a perfect example of something I wished someone else had done and said "ok, so here's how you build it". I've found the arcade collecting community to be very supportive and I would love to give something back to it.
2) If for some reason I fail, get bored, get interrupted by real life, etc., I want to make all of my information public so that if someone else wanted to pick up where I left off and complete the project they could easily do so.
3) Realistically, there is a limited market for this so even IF I were to make a polished final product and sell any, it would be for those that can't or don't want to spend the time building there own. This is not my job, it's a hobby, so any proceeds will go to funding further arcade projects and cabinets and the cost would really only cover parts and assembly time in order to keep it as low as possible .
4) By sharing my work, a real engineer might see it and say "dude, it would work a lot better if you did THIS..." and the end result would be a better product for everyone .
Once I have it working a little better I'll post my schematics and code in this thread.